Mobile heats up at Red Hat

2015 is off to a great start for the mobile team here at Red Hat. We were thrilled to see FeedHenry by Red Hat ranked as the top enterprise Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) in an analysis by GigaOM Research published last week.

Analyst Janakiram MSV describes unprecedented growth of mobile backend platforms over the last two years, and we would agree with his observation. Enterprise mobility is at the center of what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst describes as a once-every-twenty-years kind of change, as IT shifts from client-server to cloud-mobile.

We have seen firsthand the shifting emphasis of many enterprises toward a “mobile-first” approach to application development, an observation that is echoed in the GigaOM Research report, and have made investments over the last year that substantially expand our mobile capabilities. Together with our award-winning portfolio of cloud technologies, we believe we are well-positioned to become the provider of choice for enterprise IT in this new cloud-mobile environment.

This mobile-first imperative is one of five disruption vectors identified by GigaOM Research that are expected to mold the enterprise mobile market, and particularly MBaaS, over the next two years. The other areas to watch include a convergence of features from multiple products, a need for increased control of data assets, a need to unlock corporate data silos, and the growing influence of DevOps and agile methodologies in mobile development.

Furthermore, the report predicts a blurring of the lines in the coming years between MBaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies. I would argue that Red Hat is one of the only technology providers today that has the ability and vision to do this. We are already well down this path with our Red Hat JBoss xPaaS Services, which marries the traditional middleware capabilities of our Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio with our industry-leading PaaS technology, OpenShift. FeedHenry by Red Hat fits right into the sweet spot of cloud-based enterprise mobile development and deployment.

It’s an exciting time to be in the mobile market and have this opportunity to help shape the next twenty years of enterprise IT. We’re proud of our colleagues from mobile team, whose vision and hard work has led to this recognition of leadership by GigaOM Research, and look forward to a bright, “mobile-first” future.